September 17, 2016

The capital of Silicon Valley is ready to abdicate. A few weeks ago, bizarre as it might seem, Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt came out against jobs. “We’re looking to increase the rate of housing growth,” he told Curbed San Francisco, “but decrease the rate of job growth.”

Think about that. Almost every mayor in the U.S. is wracking his brain trying to entice jobs into town. Yet Palo Alto—3.8% unemployment, a magnet for the geek class, the place that nurtured Facebook—is telling everyone else to get lost.

I had to meet this guy. Near City Hall, I pulled my (proudly gas guzzling) car into a spot between a white Tesla and a black Tesla. This was the Coral parking zone, giving me two hours before I had to move to the Lime zone. Nearby stood the Epiphany, a new $800-a-night hotel, just down from the ancient House of Foam, fulfilling all your polyurethane and polystyrene needs. Next to the Verizon Wireless store, the old Stanford Theater was showing a Ruth Chatterton double feature. Palo Alto, 65,000 people sitting on 26 square miles of some of the most valuable land anywhere, is certainly a town of contrasts.

The city doesn’t have a mayoral election. Instead, the council members, some of whom identify as slow-growth “residentialists,” install one of their own as mayor for a one-year term. Now it’s Patrick Burt’s turn, and he’s making the most of it. “Big tech companies are choking off the downtown,” he told the New York Times.

Right before the mayor went rogue, one of the city’s planning commissioners, Kate Downing, resigned in an open letter. Her family, she said, couldn’t afford to live in Palo Alto any longer. She’s got a point.

Michael Dreyfus, a top real-estate agent in the area, says the cheapest home for sale is a three-bedroom, one-bathroom, 959 square footer on about an eighth of an acre that backs up to train tracks. The asking price (are you sitting down?) is $1.35 million. Or he can sell you a place with five beds and four and a half baths on less than half an acre for $17.5 million. OK, that one is in desirable Old Palo Alto, but it isn’t even that old—no cobblestone streets or anything

September 14, 2016

Mark Zuckerberg created a stir over an Instagram post this summer of him at his desk. If you look closely, you’ll see tape covering the Facebook CEO’s laptop camera and microphone jack. Does he know something we don’t? Well, yes.

Hackers are virtually (pun intended) everywhere. Mr. Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked in early June, before the photo was taken. The Democratic National Committee had 20,000 emails released on WikiLeaks right before the party’s July convention. The Federal Reserve recently admitted it’s had more than 50 cyberbreaches over the past five years. In August the National Security Agency, which says its role is to “lead the U.S. Government in cryptology” got, you guessed it, hacked.

There are essentially three reasons to hack into someone else’s systems: cash, control or cred—as in street cred. Debit and credit cards are usually the prize. Target and other retailers got nailed a few years ago, resulting in those annoying chip cards, which are slower but supposed to be more secure. Except researchers at NCR Corp.told a recent Black Hat security conference that they’ve hacked those too. Time to go back to cash?

As for control, Hillary Clinton claims, “We know that Russian Intelligence services hacked into the DNC.” Uh huh. If the Russians were controlling our elections, wouldn’t Bernie Sanders have won the primary? Control is a real concern, especially when it comes to stock exchanges, power plants or nuclear launch codes. But these are, one hopes, the most guarded targets, with multilayered offline security.

Which brings us to cred. Many hackers hack just because they can. The “dark web,” basically hidden websites, and internet relay chat channels like Hackerfleet and OnionIRC light up with ideas and exploits and bragging rights. To me, these hacks, while they can be damaging, are like a Freedom of Information Act for the internet. We only know about Mrs. Clinton’s private email server, for instance, because Sidney Blumenthal’s AOL account was hacked in March 2013. AOL?